Re: [orca-list] math

["Alastair Irving" <alastair irving sjc ox ac uk>]

Hi

I totally agree with Michael's suggestion of LaTeX, and think you'll find
that with practise you can become very prefficient in it, (as a linear
language I think its ideal for a blind user).  As I write a lot of complex
maths in LaTeX I created a set of python scripts to translate a line of
LaTeX into more human friendly speech and nemeth braille.  Unfortunately,
they currently only work with Jaws under windows as I haven't had time to
look into creating orca scripts to work with them.  For more information see

http://latex-access.sourceforge.net
For someone with time and knowledge of Orca I don't think it would be too
difficult to get them working.  

HTH

Alastair Irving





-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of aerospace1028 hotmail com
Sent: 23 April 2008 14:18
To: Michael Whapples; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] math



Thank you, Michael, for your informative reply.

> First of all you mentioned about using openoffice writer to edit/read 
> math, I don't think this is good/possible.

I'm sorry, I don't think I was clear on what i was doing.  I was just
testing out the formual editor.  I know I've had problems accessing the
equation editor in MSWord.  The ability to use the editor to incert simple
equations (like I used to do at school for lab reports) is a little improved
over my MSWord experience, but in either case I can't validate the result.
My suspicion was that this was do to the manner in which the "equation
editors" in bedded the resulting equation editor data (I'm not sure how they
do it, i just guessed it wasn't a manner easily compatible with AT).

> Something you may wish to
> consider, and you may prefer it also for doing any document is the 
> LaTeX  type setting language.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that i did look at latex.  It is helpful in
generating reports and such with math, but I still don't have the capacity
to validate that the math that is being written is the same math I intended
to write.  After I get more familiar with it, it'll get better, but whenI'm
still learning something, I like the safety-net of double-checking my
output.

> So while access is not great to math on Linux, I would say access to 
> math in general isn't great ...

Which in general is what i've been experimenting with.  Just seeing if what
i'd been able to find was the general capability available.  I realize the
concept of providing access to mathematical information can be tricky.  My
general impression is that mathml would be the easiest to plug into--with
some sort of mathml-to-Nemith Braille conversion.  But it'd be a matter of
if enough material used mathml for it to be the most viable tool.

> You may also wish to discuss some of this stuff on the NFB blindmath 
> mailing list as there are certainly Linux users there as well (in fact 
> some of them, me included, are here as well).

Thank you.  I'll check that out.

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